‘Go Teams’ in Action Within Hours : U.S. Experts Kept on Alert to Probe Plane Disasters

Ira Furman was out in the patio of his home in Silver Spring, Md., enjoying his daily cigar, when he got the word.

G. H. Patrick Bursley was “opening a little bottle of wine” for dinner with his wife at their house in Bethesda, Md., when his phone rang.

The callers were different--Furman heard the grim news from a reporter, Bursley from a federal official--but the message was the same:

A Delta Air Lines L-1011 jetliner had crashed and burned when making an approach to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport during a violent thunderstorm. It was time for Furman and Bursley to go to work.

Furman, a public information officer; Bursley, a retired Coast Guard admiral, and about a dozen other specialists are members of one of the “Go Teams” that the National Transportation Safety Board keeps on alert--24 hours a day, seven days a week--ready to spring into action at the first word of a major civilian air crash.

Their job is to find out why the crash occurred.

It has been a week since the Dallas crash, in which 133 persons were killed, and the safety board investigators have sifted through tons of wreckage, interviewed hundreds of witnesses, examined reams of records and listened again and again to recordings of the final conversations in the cockpit, in the control tower and between the two.

A lot of what was learned has been released to the news media, and public suspicion focuses strongly on a meteorological phenomenon called “low-level wind shear”--a system of violent downdrafts spawned by thunderstorms that can hurl an aircraft to the ground as it attempts to land or take off.

But Furman, Bursley and other members of the team--each of whom is assigned specific areas of responsibility--have learned not to eliminate any possibility until the investigation is completed, probably at least a month from now.

“Each investigator is taught that his work may provide an answer, no matter how apparent the problems turned up by another investigator might be,” Furman said.

Board Member Heads Team

Bursley, one of three currently active members of the presidentially appointed National Transportation Safety Board, has been heading up the team that was on call when the word of the Dallas crash came in to safety board headquarters in Washington.

Like Furman and other members of the team, he wears a beeper whenever on call and stays within two hours’ distance of Washington’s National Airport, from which the teams usually are dispatched.

“If I go to a ballgame, I always leave early,” Furman said. “That way, if the beeper goes off, I won’t get caught in as much traffic. And I always leave a suitcase half-packed at home.”

This time, the word reached most team members by phone. Well within the two-hour limit, all had assembled at National Airport. Shortly thereafter, they were on their way to Dallas.

There was Rudy Kapustin, the investigator in charge, the man responsible for coordinating the efforts of the others.

There was the operations investigator, the man responsible for reviewing the history of the airplane and the operation and training policies of the airline involved.

There was an investigator responsible for sorting out and interviewing witnesses, an investigator to study the backgrounds and records of the flight crew, an investigator to examine maintenance records and an investigator to study the role of air traffic controllers.

There was an investigator to study weather factors and an investigator to study the injuries of the victims and what caused them. There was Furman, to relay information to the news media.

There were experts to study what role, if any, the engines, airframe and hydraulic systems played in the crash. There was an engineer whose job it was to determine how, and in what sequence, the airplane disintegrated and burned.

Joined by Outside Experts

By Saturday morning, they had been joined by experts from the Federal Aviation Administration, the Airline Pilots Assn. and Delta. There were representatives from Lockheed, which manufactured the airplane, and Rolls Royce, which built its engines.

Despite the fact that the inquiry includes fixing blame, if there is any, “it’s exceptional how wholehearted and enthusiastic the cooperation is,” Furman said. “The aviation industry simply wants to find out what went wrong, to prevent a recurrence.”

By mid-morning Saturday, the debris was being photographed in place before being moved to a nearby Delta hangar.

Then, while some of the investigators examined the larger chunks of wreckage--the engines and much of the tail section remained mostly intact--other team members sorted through the smaller bits of rubble scattered over several hundred yards.

“It looked like a mall after a Fourth of July Beach Boys concert,” Furman said. “There was everything out there.”

On Thursday, ground crews using shovels, skiploaders and refuse trucks were still scraping up the last of the debris--twisted seats, singed copies of the Delta flight magazine, “Sky,” a bottle of suntan lotion, and, in one pathetic little heap, a collection of plastic toys and a children’s book, “The TV Chipmunks.”

Furman said that all the wreckage will be stored at the hangar until investigators are satisfied that they have unearthed all significant evidence. Meanwhile, other members of the team had started talking to people--FAA tower personnel, pilots of other planes aloft in the area or on the runways when the crash occurred, surviving passengers and crew members, motorists on the highway where the plane first hit--anyone who might provide a clue as to what happened and why.

Personnel in military control towers also were questioned--and their radar data examined--to determine what they might have seen, heard and recorded about the ill-fated L-1011 in the moments before it crashed.

“One guy found a rain gauge on a farmer’s fence post,” Furman said. “It might tell us something about the weather.”

Kapustin said one remaining question Thursday was why the Dallas-Fort Worth tower, which knew 20 minutes before the crash of alto-cumulus clouds near the approach pattern, failed to notify the Delta pilot. Such clouds are often indicative of thunderstorm activity.

Data Evaluation Begins

By Thursday afternoon, many of the safety board members were leaving town. Some headed back to Washington to begin evaluating the collected data. Some moved on to Atlanta to check Delta’s crew histories and training procedures. Some hauled chunks of twisted metal off to laboratories for microscopic analysis that could show if any critical parts had failed before the crash.

The safety board investigators were keeping their opinions to themselves, saying that any findings and recommendations probably will not be disclosed for several months, well after public hearings here that probably won’t be scheduled until sometime in September.

But that hasn’t stopped local tongues from wagging about the violent thunderstorm through which the plane was flying as it approached the runway, or about the mysterious phenomenon known as wind shear.

“It’s understandable why people are concentrating on that,” Furman said. “That L-1011 is an extremely reliable plane, and there were no reports of distress.

“We know the aircraft was in extremely heavy rain,” he said. “We know wind shear can come up very quickly. We know that winds rocked the airport a few minutes after the crash.

“But we still can’t say what caused that crash,” he said.